- Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen,
we're making a delicious red velvet cake.
So let's get started.
To make this cake you'll need eggs, salt, butter,
cocoa powder, baking soda, a little sugar,
buttermilk, vanilla, vinegar, red food coloring,
all purpose flour, cream cheese, and powdered sugar too.
You wanna prep your pans before you get started
on the batter.
So you can use baking spray, a little butter,
and either flour them or add cocoa powder,
just to dust them and make sure they release really easily.
Now we're gonna start that amazing batter.
Into a large bowl I'm adding 300 grams,
or two and a half cups, of all purpose flour.
That was too much.
Nice thing about a scale is you can always take it away.
I'm adding almost a teaspoon of kosher salts.
In you go.
As well as one teaspoon of baking soda.
This is gonna react with one of the ingredients later on.
Our scale is done.
We're gonna give this a mix and just set it aside
before we get our room temperature butter out.
Into the bowl of my stand mixer
I'm adding half cup of butter.
This is room temperature,
but I'm gonna give this a nice mix.
Any kind of darker cake like red velvet,
something you're gonna notice,
clumps of unmixed nonsense in,
so we want the butter to be really well creamed up.
Now to that I'm adding 150 grams,
or one and a half cups of granulated sugar.
Red velvet is a classic and delicious cake.
It's one of my favorites because I love chocolate,
I love cream cheese.
It has the best of both worlds.
Traditionally, it's a light chocolate cake.
I mean, decades ago, it was a very light chocolate cake.
There's buttermilk, cocoa powder, and vinegar in it.
They have a reaction and you get a light pinkish cake.
It's like a dusty pink, very cute.
But with the advent of photography and amping things up,
it's become a red cake.
Some versions don't have any chocolate in it,
but I think this cake definitely needs
a little kiss of chocolate.
Now we're gonna add the eggs in one at a time,
let them incorporate in between.
There we go.
Beautiful color.
For me, not you.
So let's scrape that bowl down
so you can see the yellow too.
This is why we scrape,
totally firm butter packed down on the bottom,
and it's very watery and eggy on top.
We want a homogenous mixture, the same throughout.
Mix that up until it's nice and smooth.
Now we can drizzle in two teaspoons of a nice vanilla.
While that's mixing,
I'm gonna measure out one cup of buttermilk.
And I'm mixing in a tablespoon of vinegar.
The vinegar of course, is an acid,
and that's gonna give our cake a huge lift.
When the batter comes together,
you're gonna see the bubbles,
and it's gonna be so light and dreamy.
And pausing this to talk about the red situation.
Like I said, historically,
red velvet cake was naturally a dusty pink
from the chocolate,
but we're gonna amp it up
with a little bit of food coloring.
You can skip this.
And I actually like to do
a little bit of red food coloring for the batter,
and then we're gonna separate some batter,
cook it as a cupcake, because a cupcake,
and that's gonna get crumbled for the outside
so it looks really dramatic
without adding all the food coloring.
Let's give this a mix.
Does not look red at all.
A little more food coloring.
There we go.
That looks pretty red right now.
It will become less red when we add the flour
and mix it with the butter and everything else.
I'm about to mix the cocoa powder
into our light chocolate cake, but a word of caution.
So we're using natural cocoa powder,
not Dutch processed cocoa powder.
Dutch processed cocoa powder has less acid in it,
less acidic, which makes fudgy baked goods,
good for brownies.
But for this cake, in theory,
you want the acidity in the cocoa powder
to react with the buttermilk.
In practice we're amping things up,
because we added some vinegar, more acid,
and we added baking soda, which will react with the vinegar.
Baking soda is what you add to baked goods
that have some acid,
like brown sugar or buttermilk, in them,
and they'll really get fluffy and just amazing.
I'm adding three tablespoons of cocoa powder in.
You could add in a little bit more,
if you want it extra chocolatey,
or even go as far as not adding any,
if you don't like chocolate for some reason.
Not gonna judge you.
I have very good friends with chocolate allergies.
I'm mixing this in a bit
before I add the third tablespoon in.
We're just sifting it in,
because cocoa notoriously has many lumps in it.
Don't know what happened.
It's like some messy person walked into my kitchen
and just brought havoc.
I don't know what to tell you.
It was an accident.
As my kids say, "It's okay when accidents happen."
I think that's true.
If they happen occasionally.
That never happened.
Now we're gonna mix our cocoa powder in,
get it really well mixed before we go onto the next step.
Okay.
Yes, there we go.
You always wanna mix well until you add the flour in.
Once the flour's in, you're really mixing until combined,
'cause you don't wanna activate the gluten in the flour
and get a cake that is just kind of dense and gummy.
You want it to melt in your mouth,
especially if it's red velvet.
I'm adding half of the dry mixture in right now.
Mix that until it is almost combined.
Add the wet mixture in, half of it.
The remaining dry,
and the remaining wet, red mixture.
It looks like a science experiment.
I did so much recipe testing on this.
When I originally made this, and I tried everything,
I tried beet root powder, the works,
and it just didn't cut the mustard, so to speak.
Oh boy, I'm glad we prepped our pans first,
because this is foaming up already.
See all those bubbles happening?
That's the vinegar.
Okay, this is foaming up,
so get that into your prepared pans,
divided up evenly, and I'm using three, six inch.
You could use two, eight-inch pans, both work fine.
If you want three, eight-inch pans, double the recipe.
I tried eyeballing it, did not work out,
so I popped them onto a scale,
made sure they're all roughly equal.
And before these go into the oven,
I'm putting on my ancient cake strips.
These guys are just wet fabric strips
that you wrap around your cakes.
They give you a nice even bake with almost no doming.
But I forgot something, oh my gosh.
I forgot I wanna take a little bit of batter.
So I'm gonna steal some batter from each pan.
So glad I remembered.
It makes decorating the cake way easier.
So here, gonna add a little bit more food coloring,
and this is gonna be super red because I'm mixing it up
with such a small amount of batter.
It'll bake up in 15 minutes, 'cause it's not very much.
This batter's for crumbling over the cake
just to give it a nice red decoration at the end.
Cake strips are on,
and these guys are ready to go into the oven.
350 for, oh, close to 35 minutes.
You wanna see that the edge is pulling away from the pan
and the center is springy when you touch it.
My cakes are in the oven, and as promised,
I wanna show you how to get them out with no tearing.
First of all, though, you should see here,
the cake separated from the pan.
That's how you know your cake is really done.
You can also listen to it.
Shouldn't be popping off and make a bunch of sounds.
It should be fairly quiet.
All right, here's the deal,
wait for it to cool down just enough so it's touchable,
and then tap it.
You're giving it a lateral tap,
and it's breaking free of the bottom if it's at all stuck.
So tap, tap, tap.
I can even see my cake jump in the pan.
Pop it out.
And it is nice and ready.
Repeat for the other cake layers
and set them aside to cool completely
before we assemble it up.
I'm having second thoughts.
Is this too chocolaty?
Let me know in the comments.
I'm gonna ask Brian what he thinks.
Does it need to be more red for everybody?
It was only in 1940s that things got really out of control
with food coloring,
before then they would look basically like this.
So I don't know, I might remake them.
That was like a hint of red velvet cake,
so I made it up again.
Two tablespoons of cocoa powder,
you could even go down to one,
and a little bit more food coloring in the red.
Okay, a little bit more food coloring in the butter.
Red, red!
That looks way better, okay.
If you watch this channel, you know,
I'm normally not one to pour food coloring into things,
but everything has a time and a place,
and this cake is a special occasion cake
that people wanna see it and be visually struck by its color
and beauty.
That's the nice color we wanna see.
And you can see how frothy it is from all of the vinegar
we added that combined with the baking soda.
These look great.
While they're cooling we're gonna make the most amazing
cream cheese frosting ever.
It's so easy too.
Into the bowl of your stand mixer,
fitted with a paddle attachment,
or a big bowl if you're using a hand mixer,
add one cup of butter, that's 226 grams,
and it should be room temperature and preferably unsalted,
although you can use salted butter in this.
Just don't add any more salt.
Now we're adding two, eight ounce blocks of cream cheese,
452 grams.
And by the way, the cream cheese in this instance,
doesn't have to be really liquidy,
because cream cheese frosting is amazing and delicious,
but it can be a little soft, which is frustrating.
You don't wanna add tons and tons of sugar
to it to stabilize it because then it's too sweet.
If you use cooler cream cheese
it just has a little bit of a thicker consistency,
and your frosting will set up really nice.
Lock it off.
We're gonna mix this up for a few minutes
until it is nice, creamy, and homogenous.
Once it's nicely mixed,
we're gonna add a teaspoon of vanilla and a pinch of salt,
unless you use salted butter.
Now it's time to add the powdered sugar,
six cups or 680 grams,
and that's gonna be added in a couple of batches.
Don't dump it all on at the same time,
because that will be a sugar explosion.
This isn't a frosting, by the way,
to decorate a three layer, six-inch cake,
or a two layer, eight-inch cake really easily.
Mix on low in a few batches.
When you make frostings,
you really do not wanna beat on high.
That's gonna give you a lot of air bubbles,
which in this instance is just not great for decorating.
So low and slow is the way to go with frostings.
I'll be so proud of myself if there's not sugar everywhere.
Wish me luck.
Just be patient and this will totally get worked in,
and be a wonderful silky consistency.
At first, it looks a little bit granular and weird,
but it'll get fixed on its own.
See, already it's almost there?
I wish you could smell these cakes with the frosting.
It's pretty amazing.
Do yourself a favor and scrape the bowl down at least once.
Really important to scrape the bowl down
because otherwise you'll have some amazing frosting,
some frosting that's too sweet, some that's too buttery.
You want it to be all good.
Everyone gets an amazing bite.
A couple of minutes of mixing on low and pure silk.
It is amazing.
The consistency you get is just wonderful.
This is ready to go onto my cake now.
It is a little soft.
That's fine.
We're gonna build it carefully and then chill it.
I'm ready to build.
I like to make my cakes directly on a cake plate,
but this one isn't getting transported.
If you need to move it, get a cardboard round.
A little bit of frosting on the bottom for glue,
and we're gonna center it, and now build it up.
Maybe like half a cup of frosting in between each layer.
That'll be about enough.
This cake is really happy
with the cream cheese frosting on it, so don't skimp.
A lot of people get intimidated with layer cakes,
and they are so easy.
Let me know if you want a video, like a new video,
on all my cake decorating tips.
But if this started getting wobbly,
or something was going awry,
the only thing you need to do,
is put a skewer through the middle
and then just chill it up.
So it'll firm and fix itself.
Heat is the enemy of cakes until they're fully built.
Nice and tall and proud.
I love a three layer cake.
I'm doing a really simple but beautiful decoration scheme
on this cake.
Plop some frosting on top.
One of the key elements will be that reserved,
little cupcake of frosting.
Frosting?
That reserved extra red cupcake.
So that'll get crumbled up,
and we're gonna add it onto the side.
But first.
Ooh, look at that, that's a wobbly cake, but it's okay.
Let's get a nice layer on top.
Now we're gonna go for some coverage all down the side.
And here, if you have a turntable,
you could definitely use that.
- [Brian] Is this some special cake decorating position?
- Mm-hmm, yes, I like to get really close to my cakes.
I didn't shrink.
I'm tempted to crumb coat this,
and crumb coating just means
that you're gonna add a thin layer and chill it up
before adding a final coat.
But I think we can get away with not doing that.
Well, this is going into the fridge for a minute,
just until I get my piping bags.
Normally, this is what I do to begin with.
I just find it easier.
Fill up a big piping bag with the frosting
and you can pipe it onto the side,
get some good coverage and then smooth it out.
Snip the tip off your piping bag.
And now this is so much easier.
Watch this.
Just going to pipe along the edge,
and I should have plenty of frosting leftover
for a little flourish on top.
Cream cheese frosting is so delicious,
but do not stress about getting perfectly smooth,
it's not that kind of frosting.
Use a small knife and just smooth the side out
a little bit up and down.
We're definitely gonna have excess.
That's fine, that's for the top.
So, now we're just gonna give it more of a smooth.
Do not stress out about it though,
because we're adding crumbs all over it,
there's more decorations,
it's not supposed to be like a mirror-smooth cake.
This can hang out in the fridge for a few minutes
while we do something else.
I reserved a little batter and baked one cupcake,
which is more red, had more red food coloring in it.
Now you can crumble it up or you use a cheese grater
and just grate it up to get little crumbs
that were gonna decorate the side with.
Here we go.
Lots of nice red crumbs to decorate our cake with.
I plopped on an 846 tip, that's a large, closed star,
but you can use anything you'd like.
And now I'm just gonna decorate this
with kind of a little scallop pattern.
Just go back and forth,
and really try and get some height and definition,
but not so much that it'll fall over.
That would be bad.
So I am pulling it off then going back over,
and then pulling it off.
Cute.
Grab a handful of crumbs,
and we're just gonna make a nice crummy skirt,
just like that.
Let's people know what's inside the cake
and gives it a little bit of extra contrast.
Whenever you do a skirt, get some coverage on the base,
and then add a little bit on top,
so it's kind of a gradient of the material.
Yep, that looks nice.
Just a couple extra pieces on top
really make a huge difference.
Your cake can be enjoyed right away or chilled.
Make sure you keep it in the refrigerator
it's hanging out for awhile.
Melt in your mouth chocolate cake
with that luscious cream cheese frosting.
This is a must make recipe.
I hope you enjoy.
And if you like this video, check out my cake playlist.